The American government loves debt. It offers special tax breaks to interest payments-mortgage interest, if you're a person; all interest, if you're a firm. This has a number of pernicious effects. On the personal level, it's a gift to home sellers--as we've seen with the homeowner's tax credit, any special break you give to home buyers tends to end up in the pockets of home sellers, as the buyers bid up the price to their maximum affordable net monthly cost. On the corporate side, it privileges debt over equity financing. In both cases, it adds considerable risk, since the fixed debt payment schedule may not match up with the flow of income.
Virtually all economists, aside from David Lereah and his successors, think that the mortgage interest tax deduction should be eliminated, using some sort of sunset combined with a grandfather clause so that we don't suddenly push millions of more American homeowners into foreclosure. Equalizing the treatment of dividends and interest payments is also popular. But I don't usually hear people advocating, as Felix Salmon does, eliminating the deduction for corporate interest payments. In a post titled "What are the arguments for privileging debt?" he says:
The weird thing for me is that when I start banging this particular drum, I always get exactly the same answer: "yes, great idea, not gonna happen". But is there any intellectual justification whatsoever for making corporate interest payments tax-deductible? I can see an argument for a carve-out for highly-regulated banks, since their entire business is based on making profits from the spread between the rate at which they lend and the rate at which they borrow. But banks aside, why should companies pay lots of tax on dividends, and no tax at all on bond coupons?
In a way it's depressing: if this were a real debate and Paul Volcker had a remote chance of making interest taxation happen, then surely there would be no shortage of academics and corporate lobbyists making the case for keeping the status quo. The fact that they're not even bothering is all the evidence we need that this isn't even going to reach trial-balloon status, let alone get signed into law.
But still, the question remains: if they were to start taking this seriously, what arguments would they use? After all, as Surowiecki notes, the likes of Brazil and Belgium seem to do perfectly well without giving debt this artificial advantage
Maybe I was brainwashed by the infamous Chicago School, but I can think of a lot of reasons for the tax treatment of debt. After all, let's think about why corporate debt is deductible, while personal interest largely isn't. Personal income is defined for tax purposes, broadly, as what you were paid this year. But corporate income is defined as what you were paid (revenue) minus what you had to pay others.